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Not too long ago my last SCSI CD-ROM drive failed. I still have a number of Kurzweil CDROM discs with useful sample libraries on them that I’ve been unable to read as a result – they were made prior to the 3.61 update that added ISO-9660 support.

Marc Halbruegge wrote a fantastic program, KCDRead.exe, that lets you read these older CDROMs and dump the files to a folder on a Win 95/NT/2000 machine. Sadly it didn’t work on XP or newer 32- or 64-bit Windows releases…until now.

In newer Windows, there is a SCSI PassThrough Interface (SPTI) that replaces the old ASPI interface. Someone wrote an ASPI-to-SPTI converter called FrogASPI that runs in usermode and requires no kernel module or driver.

Distributed databases with a near-real-time multi-master configuration – such as BigCouch, coming soon to Apache CouchDB – must deal with the potential of simultaneous modifications of a single resource. While the approach taken by multiple single-machine Apache CouchDB servers using regular HTTP replication is well understood, the situation changes a little bit when dealing with BigCouch-style internal replication inside a cluster.

I think it’s time to have a better understanding of what this means, and what impact this has on you as an application developer. Most of the time, there’s no change – to your app, a BigCouch-style cluster looks and feels like a single Apache CouchDB node. But when making near-simultaneous writes to the same document from different clients, you may experience document conflicts that you wouldn’t have with an Apache CouchDB 1.x single server.

How does this happen? Bear with me – this gets a bit complex. Hopefully this diagram will help.

A game I tried out at PAX East 2012, Orion: Dino Beatdown, was just released. While the game felt fairly unpolished on the convention floor, I felt it might be a good (and hopefully cheap!) time-waster for my small group of friendson release – the way we used to take 30 minutes for a few rounds of CounterStrike:Source or Left 4 Dead.

My friend bought the game at release and confirmed my worst fears: it’s buggier than any other initial release he’s seen, including the venerable ArmA series. Other games recently have been released with some bad bugs, but nothing compares to this massive list, provided by my friend LeeT on IRC:

When you run it the first time it does the usual install redist 3rd party stuff. However, the game does not wait for that to finish and launches anyway.

It only randomly saves any key bindings, audio or video options.

80% of the time, it never even populates the server list.

When it does populate the server list, it will often misreport servers as being full.

so a couple of weeks ago i presented my third academic publication, this one titled “persisting chat for communities of practice.”

joan at icel 2009

in layman’s terms, it’s a new logging system for online group chat (irc, jabber, etc.) with special integrations into non-synchronous systems such as web forums (academically often called asynchronous learning networks), blogs, etc. the goal is to make chat less transient and throwaway, to promote it to a first class citizen within the wide variety of mechanisms that can be used to help communities. it’s especially designed for communities of practise as described by lave and wenger out at xerox parc way back in the day. go read the linked article, it’s not half bad for wikipedia.

the system will be released under an open source license later this year. if you’d like to get involved, comment here using your real email address and i’ll get in touch.